A little known MOS note describes how you can potentially reduce downtime by a significant amount when migrating databases between systems with different endianness. Many sites are looking for ways to move their databases from big-endian platforms such as HP-UX, AIX or Solaris/SPARC to an Exadata system running Linux. In this webinar, Martin Bach will explain how implementing a cross-platform incremental backup in conjunction with cross-platform transportable tablespaces makes this possible.

Here’s the Part 2 of the Oracle SQL plan execution hacking session (Part 1 is here)!

We’ll use a bit of DTracing to peek inside an Oracle SQL plan execution, plus some other random experiments. You can download the qer_trace.sh script from here. Note that this is not a “How to use DTrace” webinar, you have to learn DTrace yourself to understand (or enhance) this script.

Exadata Snapper (also called ExaSnapper or ExaSnap) is a new tool by Tanel Poder, which allows to “peek” into some SQL Execution-related cell metrics without leaving the Oracle database session / sqlplus prompt. The current version 0.7 is a beta version and will likely be much improved and changed once it reaches v1.0.

The tool itself will be downloadable from enkitec.com (will update this post once it’s there).